Grit Lab Report

Hi Abigail,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and power.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and spiritual.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you felt totally clear about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to the lsat 😭😭😭 .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said LSAT daily .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Gaining power .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said LITERALLY MYSELF .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I come home, lsat time .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in lsat .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Vengeful when receiving critical feedback, and Vengeful when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being the law school admissions council 🥲🥲🥲 .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Academics .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel Weird .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Grit is contextual.
I need an obsessive interest.
Find your purpose.
Personality can change.
Have a goal hierarchy
WOOP
"Deliberate practice and repeat"
Be proactive about feedback
Failure is good.
Develop a cue!
Do a good deed.
Do something good for someone.

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Coby Melkin
A quality that I think Abby exemplifies well is inquisitiveness. During lecture or team discussions, she often asks an important, clarifying question or inquiry that I would not have thought about. I believe that this curiosity has improved our teams conversations and directed those discussions in directions that we would have otherwise not explored. I have learned a lot from this confidence to ask all types of questions and I think it will serve her well in her career and life generally. I found Abby’s discovery project about K-9 research to be novel and interesting. It sounded like she had a very productive curiosity conversation about vet research related to curing cancer in K-9s. The book The Genius of Dogs sounded fascinating and I learned a lot about how dogs are smarter than we think. I was glad to hear how much she enjoyed exploring this passion and that she intends to continue pursuing it.
Quan Dao
It was truly enjoyable to be Abigail’s groupmate in the past semester of Grit Lab. She is naturally curious and never hesitated to ask insightful questions whether it’s within our group or in front of the class. Abigail always made our group’s check-in engaging with her sense of humor and personal stories. I’m confident that Abigail will be a valuable addition to whichever team she’s on. Abigail’s Discovery Project on dog training was engaging and insightful. It’s impressive how you went above and beyond with each of your activities. One thing in particular that stood out to me was how you reverse the order of activities and put in-depth research last to compare the experience that you had. I thought that was unique and I will keep that learning for my future Discovery Projects!
Ilana Jacobs
Abby is genuinely one of the most interesting people to have a conversation with. She is always asking us thought-provoking questions and always bringing up unique perspectives in conversations. I feel like Abby is the type of person that you can talk to about anything. Also, I really admire how Abby is always making insights about the members of our group and noticing any changes, which shows that she is really attentive to all of our team members. Abby is also always making jokes during conversations and it definitely makes our constant conversations about grit and hard work more refreshing. Abby’s discovery project was just as interesting and funny as she is. It was a topic that no one else had brought up in their discovery projects, animals, and all of the different facts that she shared was really interesting. I had no idea that there was a dog that knew the names of 800 toys, and now I really want to read the book that she talked about “The Genius of Dogs.” Her point about how dogs are smarter than we think was really impactful for me because I have five dogs of my own. It was also a very entertaining presentation from the start, and Abby’s one-liner jokes made the audience laugh. It was really nice to hear that she plans on adopting a dog in Chicago after graduation.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.